Thoughts about technology, government 2.0, open data, collaboration, libraries and scientific publishing.

April 13, 2007

thoughts and notes on Allen Press Emerging Trends Seminar

I enjoyed the Allen Press seminar, I really value the opportunity to meet with people working on ways to support scholarly activity using technology, and to see presentations of some of their work.

The strongest theme I heard from the technology side was a plea for increased semantic markup of journals, to build the "web of data".

I find it interesting that the more I progress in my career, the more I
find most challenges are about people/"humanities" issues and finances
- I often wonder whether some courses in human behaviour and economics
should be mandatory for all technologists.

In this vein, some other themes I heard were more about psychology and sociology:- can we find ways to recognize and reward scientific contributions outside of the published paper?- if you're not providing an explicit reward, can you find ways to tap into activities that researchers already are doing (e.g. helping them to capture and annote citations, as Zotero does)- is it possible to construct systems that discourage negative behavior (e.g. to prevent "flamewars" of vitriolic discussion)

As I suggested in my talk, I think we need to leverage knowledge from existing systems, like the "ignore list", moderation, FAQs, and other conventions of USENET discussion groups.

My presentation will be online within the next few days, it's been ready for months, but I still need to make sure all of the supporting Connotea bookmarks are available. The presentations are also supposed to be up on the Allen Press site within a few days.

By some sort of technogeek harmonic convergence, I ended up at the speakers' dinner the night before sitting with Konrad Förstner (homepage, blog) and Josh Greenberg. Not only did we have a lively discussion, it worked out well because the three of us were all speaking in the same section of the programme, at the start of the day.

I took some raw notes on a few of the presentations.I don't know how useful they are, but since this work blog started as a place to hold my conference notes and make them searchable, it seems appropriate to continue this tradition.

Donald King

sources used by researchers for their work- journal article 35%- discussion with colleagues 20%

the ultimate factor for an information channel is its accessibility

Competition for scientists' time- additional time is due to communication activity

National Survey

* key attribute: trustworthiness* followed by timeliness* followed by quality

trustworthiness of websites (as judged by surveyed researcher) was low

trends in scientists' reading patterns

* reading more* rely on libraries more

everyone has to continue to learn

trends in how articles are identified: no big change 1977 to 2006

main shift is from A&I to online searching

most readers obtain articles from library collections, not preprint archives

252 artices read per scientist per year (increase from 150 in 1977)source is about 50/50 library collection and other (131/121)